For years, the rule in Hollywood was pretty simple: familiarity but with a twist. Cheers, but it’s in a coffee shop, and everyone’s in their twenties. Lost, but it’s in LA with Joseph Fiennes. Sure, this didn’t always work – I still think fondly of you, FlashForward – but it worked a lot of the time. Crucially, it was easy to grasp why it work. We love formulas, and we love gentle variations on the formula to keep us guessing, to keep us nimble. But at the heart of it there’s familiarity, and familiarity is a very, very lovely thing in the right circumstances.
This is Switch 2, then. And it’s also my experience of having the new console for a weekend. There are lots of things I am deeply, pleasantly familiar with, and lots of little tweaks within that familiarity – some of them surprisingly consequential. Top line: I love this console a little bit. I’m glad it’s here.
And it’s a lovely thing in the hands – larger and, it feels, slightly sleeker than the Switch. And that beautiful glossy screen makes its older sibling look a bit pokey, just as the Switch once made me return to the Vita and say, really? It was that small? And with the border? Just as the Vita once made me go back to the PSP and say…
You get what I mean. But it’s still dazzling. So bright and sharp and large, such colours and such lovely smoothness. The same but slightly different, ditto the Joy-Con, which now snap into place with a lovely magnetic thunk, and which are now removed with a bumpy trigger thing that still feels a little nerve-wracking each time I do it.